“Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” — Wendy Lesser

“Ich bin ein Berliner” (I Am a Berliner), JFK famously said in West Berlin on June 26, 1963, in the face of Soviet imperial tyranny. Today, Wendy Lesser is offering the same defiance in her new book Berlin Before and After. Only Lesser offers a cautionary mirror for our times of not just post-Soviet Putin but also wannabe-tyrants like Trump.

Lesser’s loving portrait of Berlin is of a free city. She reminds us that even in Germany’s darkest hour, Berlin never actually went Nazi. The city voted left up to and including 1933, so Hitler had to abolish democracy to take it over. Nor, Lesser argues, was Nazism a reaction to Weimar Berlin’s Cabaret-style nightlife, any more than Trump is a reaction to wokeness. Economic forces, not cultural ones, she insists, enable dictators.

Today’s Berlin, as a city that memorializes its own crimes, offers America an urban lesson in acknowledging historical guilt. That’s what makes Berlin such a defiant beacon of freedom in our authoritarian age. There are more urbane cities than Berlin, but none quite as dedicated to freedom. Go there and/or read Berlin Before and After. Today we should all be Berliners.

Five Takeaways

• Our Own 1929 — or 1932? A love letter to Berlin grew a warning as America worsened: “not only in our own 1929, but perhaps 1930, ’31, or even ’32.”

• Berlin Never Went Nazi. The city voted left through 1933 — “Hitler had to abolish democracy to take over Berlin.” Nazism wasn’t caused by Weimar flamboyance, as Trump wasn’t by wokeness: “economic forces do.”

• 1929: The Year Everything Premiered. Brecht, Dix, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Wilder’s first film, Isherwood’s first visit. “Only in retrospect do we see these things as major.”

• After Means 1989. Not the Nazis’ arrival but the Wall’s fall — the dark half-century skipped, because “the city is going to tell you what happened.”

• A Mirror That Might Become Useful. Berlin acknowledges its bad deeds; America plays the hero — though Montgomery earned a concession. “A mirror that might become useful if the worst comes about.”

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy Berlin Before and After: bookshop.org

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: an everywhere with three cities
00:02:00 Lampedusa’s Shakespeare: the somewhere who saw everything
00:04:04 Our own 1929 — or 1932? The cautionary mirror
00:07:04 Prussia’s capital: a beige nineteenth-century city
00:11:20 1929: Grosz, Dix, Brecht, and Berlin Alexanderplatz
00:13:50 Cabaret, Isherwood, and Billy Wilder the journalist
00:14:50 Not her ideal Berlin: culture beside disorder
00:16:39 Berlin never went Nazi
00:18:23 The Goebbels playbook: the MAGA equivalences
00:20:28 Arlie Hochschild and the view from the villages
00:21:10 Buddenbrooks, Effingers, and the road back to the shtetl
00:23:22 After means 1989: the city tells its own story
00:24:42 Beethoven’s Ninth: Freiheit, with irony
00:26:48 Graffiti, May Day, and the uses of freedom
00:27:34 Can the AfD take Berlin?
00:30:06 Erpenbeck at Barnard: second-class citizens
00:32:53 Pabst’s choice: Hollywood or the Nazis
00:34:05 The exiles who went back: Brecht, Piscator, Miłosz
00:36:35 Wings of Desire: the city you can’t tell from a set
00:40:58 Deighton, le Carré, and the Berlin thriller
00:42:54 What Berlin knows: acknowledging bad deeds
00:44:28 The Montgomery pushback: is she being fair to America?
00:47:04 Rents, trains, and a dignified existence
00:49:36 The Maybachufer market and the M29 bus